SCIENCE and SENSIBILITY

Wednesday

2.1.2020.

News of the Covid-19 pandemic is worse and worser. Meanwhile, this is how I watch Television on my non-cabled 12 inch old clunker which gets reasonable reception from it's rabbit-ear antenna on several key channels (thank goodness)

and this is my 12 inch cabled laptop where I store pictures, get email, construct my blog posts and read several others, interact on Facebook, and watch you tube and other videos.

How might it be, I wonder, without these luxuries?

More silent and less stressful I suspect.

Still, my 'prayer' is that the electric grid is maintained and the cable connections hold for the duration,

"April Fools"

(A Holiday gift from my Massachusetts 'family')

~*~

Thursday

4.2.2020

Self Defense

Midnight Temperature 97.7-taken once or twice a day because of Covid-19. It's not all I do now, locked down in my apartment for who knows how long, I've gotten blurry in more ways than one.

 

Time

'Retired' many years ago, I lived alone and time was at my command for the most part. Other than the occasional appointments, meetings or events, It was simply mine to decide. Now, it's out of my hands.

One abandons the external clock and reverts to that internal one; to night and day, the minute details of each moment and every activity in the service of survival. Sound dominates the current quiet. How welcome are these clankings of hundred year old iron pipes as they deliver hissing heat. How comforting that hiss is. Everything seems to take more time, yet time continues to expand or contract unpredictably. Out of contact with people, thinking about them has becomes more abstract, introspection more intense.
 

Time to get Out Walking

Union Square

Squil in Bloom
 
Chess and Dog Walking

A gathering without social distance
Spring

Social distance line to enter Trader Joe Grocery Store
entrance at the far left (middle) down near Third Avenue!
I decided I didn't need anything. 

 8 p.m.
Watched full Episode
"The Polio Crusade"
Remembered getting the shot at school and that I developed a slight fever late that evening at home, but it passed.
Ten Minute Preview
https://www.pbs.org/video/chapter-1-polio-crusade-ng86fe/

More
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk
~*~
  

THE LAYERS

Goodnight Dear Zendo

~*~

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“Live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

'The Layers' by Stanley Kunitz
~*~

THRIFTS
Cattle skull and pink pumps
on old leather cases
for resale

Reminds me of Emily the Gardener
long gone from NY, her style
for resale
 

~*~

WEATHER
Rain one day, downpour upon downpour
Lakes in every street corner
Overflowing everywhere
'
Next day Overcast

Then another
Windy and Mild


 with Pigeon

 ~*~

NEIGHBORHOOD
Iconic Bar a block away for decades
Still going though I've never been inside
Family Owned. If walls could talk...

 (https://www.mcswiggansbar.com/)
 ~*~

RESPONSE
After catching up on the World News
Wednesday and Thursday

 https://youtu.be/39xq5AATMp4

GRAMERCY ARTS CLUB

Celebrating International Archaeology Day with His Excellency Ambassador Mohamed Edrees of Egypt

Egypt and Civilization are words which belong together. Much inquiry has centered around tombs, temples, monuments. It is instructive to witness a rare culture and legacy encompassing Pharaohs, Ptolemaics, Copts, Muslims.

With creative perspective, the diversity and density of layers existing beyond time can be understood. Egypt served as melting pot, integrated into a singular heritage. Together we embark upon a voyage unlike any other: a journey extending from rocks to symbols and from people to intellectual concepts, humanity’s journey through history to a unique civilization.

 ~*~

FRIDAY
Rescued Discard

 Replenished Larder
Included Treats

Weeks End
Feel Free to Rage Against the Machine

~*~

TEDDY SAYS

Tuesday
10.1.2019
"Forgive Yourself, you're only Human."

Bears, especially the comfort-companion kind, can't lie.
They see everything for what it is;
Accumulated stress.
~*~

Wednesday
10.2.2019
Rain on the way at 5 p.m.

Waiting for the bus,
she's playing scrabble

A disheveled older woman begging
blocking the entrance to the Deli

At the Zendo
6 p.m.
 We included Bernie Sanders in our prayers
 

~*~

Thursday
10.3.2019
Posted a Package and Monthly Bill payments.
Misty Manhattan.
Sometimes a day can feel like a year and a year like an hour:

"In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said "now," it was gone. If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know. You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and alive, causing the heart
to sway in the rifts between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.
Is it concentration of the mind
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?,
In time we are present only
by forgetting time."

'Leavings' by Wendell Berry

.
Trinity
"Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver) and Shiva (destroyer) are a trinity (the Trimurti), and are aspects of the one, infinite, deity."

 ~*~

Friday
10.4.2019
Finding sky from a South East facing apartment window:
I stretch outward, camera firmly in hand, twist to the left and look up.
Morning

 Early Afternoon

 Late Afternoon

5 p.m.
Self Portrait

Song for Autumn
by Mary Oliver

In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

7 p.m.
Visit with Friends Margaritta and Trudy
Attempt to catch portrait of 'Lucy"

Not cooperating

Not having it.

Then
Trader Joe
Everything  elses eemed to have pumpkin in it.


~*~

CLARITY through the HAZE

Monday
The Waxing moon almost Invisible

behind a cool, dense, damp Haze

Even though it's Politics
This Episode of the Late Show is Brilliant

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gUcGGVTme3w?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0

Tuesday
Sunshine came and went. I did fifty or more little domestic things around the apartment, made some changes to a drawing in process, cooked and prepped meals for several days and when the rain started again around midnight, I went for a neighborhood constitutional.
 
Holyhock Bush

 Sweet Mimosa Blooms

Gramercy Court on 22nd Street

~*~

Wednesday
Sun's Out
Though storms are on the way.

~*~

 Thursday
Made these to send to Rose Kelleher...
...she sent me five of her beauties to mail to remind folks to vote

Last blooms on the free flowers with petal memories

Trip to Trader Joe on 31st Street, where purchased 1/2 and 1/2, beans and a potato, then used their very clean rest stop before leaving

On a stretch of 2nd Avenue, many homeless men gather for safety

The Moon shines on all of us alike

*
 
~*~
 
Friday
When news of the wide world wearies
When my whirling spirit runs out of steam
I take to my bed for relief, let go of queries,
despairs and self pity, 'things aren't only just what they seem.'

"These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
-Shakespeare-

Meanwhile
Can anyone identify this artist of popular childrens stories? 
(A gift from Nancy Erisman )

???

~*~